I’ve heard the reason for that is archive.today uses accounts to get around paywalls and the usernames for those accounts which appear on the page are hidden in order to not reveal to the scraped service which accounts are being used.
…Archive[.]today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.
[…]
One example discussed by Wikipedia editors involved Jani Patokallio’s name being inserted into an Archive.today capture of a blog post that was mentioned by Patokallio in his February 2026 write-up of the DDoS incident.
That’s not something you do to hide your scraper account, they’re just a grudge-holding assclown who can’t be trusted to tell the truth and not misuse the traffic sent their way.
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They both change content too. Tesseract hides user activity, archive dot today owner edits stored pages.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
oh yeahhh
eah@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
I’ve heard the reason for that is archive.today uses accounts to get around paywalls and the usernames for those accounts which appear on the page are hidden in order to not reveal to the scraped service which accounts are being used.
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That explanation does not make sense for the edits they made.
That’s not something you do to hide your scraper account, they’re just a grudge-holding assclown who can’t be trusted to tell the truth and not misuse the traffic sent their way.